My 7 Thoughts on Anime
Or: Why Anime Works When Western Animation Doesn't
This is going to be my last Blog post on editorial topics. I was Initally gonna post another articled on western animation before this. Hoiwever, I felt this one was more Important To Tackle
with that Said; Why Does Anime Works When Western Animation Doesn't?
I've spent a lot of time thinking about why anime has become such a powerful global medium while Western animation—particularly American animation—has often struggled to develop the same kind of cultural ecosystem.
Obviously, this isn't an argument that all anime is good or that all Western animation is bad. There is plenty of mediocre anime, just as there is plenty of brilliant Western animation.
The more interesting explanation is history and industrial structure.
Anime developed under a very different system than that of Western animation—especially American animation. The result is that anime was allowed to become something considerably broader and more robust than what "cartoons" traditionally means in the West.
In This Article I will explain why
1) You Can't Understand Anime Without Understanding Postwar Japan
Anime didn't emerge from a vacuum. Its development is inseparable from the extraordinary transformation Japan underwent after 1945.
Japan's defeat in World War II was catastrophic. The country had experienced devastating bombing, enormous military and civilian casualties, the destruction of its cities, occupation by a foreign power, and the loss of its empire.
Yet within just two decades, the same country had undergone one of the most remarkable economic miracles in modern history.
By the 1960s, Japan was rapidly industrializing. The 1964 Tokyo Olympics and the introduction of the Shinkansen into service the samde year became symbols of Japan's return to the international stage. By the 1970s and especially the 1980s, Japanese automobiles, electronics, cameras, appliances, and consumer products were becoming globally competitive. By the late 1980s, Japan had become the envy of the world. Even after decades of economic difficulties, starting with the lost years of the 90s, Japan remains one of the world's most culturally influential and fascinating countries to this day.
Anime is one of the products of that transformation.
Of course, Manga's importance to anime cannot be overstated, as it was the spring source of of the medium.
One of the reasons postwar manga flourished was economic practicality. Japan after the war was not a wealthy society. Paper and printing resources were limited, while people still wanted entertainment. Black-and-white manga could communicate elaborate stories using relatively few resources compared with full-color comics or even worded novels.
That helped create an enormous publishing ecosystem in which serialized comics could be produced quickly and inexpensively and consumed by an enormous audience. Manga therefore became something much more than children's entertainment like in the west, It became a mass storytelling medium.
That distinction is crucial.
Once manga had established itself as a major publishing industry, anime could draw from it. In that sense, anime wasn't simply "Japanese cartoons." It was the animated extension of an already enormous storytelling ecosystem.
2) There Is No "Disney" Equivalent in Anime
This might be one of the most important differences between Japanese and American animation.
Japan has enormous animation companies. It has famous studios, famous directors, famous producers, and enormous franchises.
But it doesn't really have an exact equivalent of The Walt Disney Company dominating the entire medium.
And ironically, I think that's one of anime's greatest strengths.
In the United States, Disney became extraordinarily influential because it didn't merely become an animation studio. It became an entire entertainment conglomerate encompassing animation, film, television, theme parks, merchandise, publishing, music, and eventually streaming.
That created enormous advantages—but also enormous cultural gravity. If you wanted to make animated entertainment in America, Disney's conception of what animation was inevitably became part of the conversation.
Japan developed differently. Instead of one company becoming the unquestioned center of animation, Japan developed a much more fragmented ecosystem involving manga publishers, television networks, toy companies, animation studios, production committees, advertisers, record companies, and countless individual creators.
That fragmentation can produce plenty of problems—low wages and brutal working conditions being obvious examples—but creatively it means there isn't one institution capable of defining the entire medium.
There can be children's anime, teenage anime, romantic dramas, horror, science fiction, absurd comedy, historical dramas, psychological thrillers, experimental animation, and even pornography (well…9 out of 10 aint bad).... And all of these things can coexist under the umbrella of "anime."
That said, people frequently describe Osamu Tezuka as the "Walt Disney of Japan." There's truth to the comparison—but only half the story.
Tezuka was enormously influenced by Disney animation. He admired Disney's films and absorbed many of their visual techniques. But Tezuka wasn't simply Japan's version of Walt Disney. If anything, he was simultaneously something closer to the Walt Disney and Stan Lee Of Japan
Walt Disney helped establish an industrial model for animation and created characters that became global cultural icons.
Osamu Tezuka, meanwhile, was fundamentally a manga creator who revolutionized the visual language of Japanese comics while also becoming involved in animation. His influence therefore extended far beyond animation itself. He helped establish the modern manga language that would ultimately provide a foundation for anime to build upon
3) Anime Was Designed for Television
This may be the most underrated factor of all.
The first television anime series that truly established the modern model was Astro Boy, which premiered in 1963… And that timing is incredibly important.
Television was transforming entertainment. Theaters were no longer going to be the primary place where ordinary families encountered animation. The television set was entering people's homes, and suddenly animation could become something watched every week rather than something experienced occasionally at a movie theater.
Tezuka understood this opportunity, But there was a problem: television animation was expensive.
The solution was limited animation.
Instead of trying to animate every single movement at the level of a theatrical Disney film, Japanese animators could economize by moving individual parts of a character, holding frames, using dramatic camera angles, reusing backgrounds, employing still images, and relying heavily on editing, sound, dialogue, and music.
This wasn't necessarily because Japanese animators were incapable of making Disney-style animation, It was because they couldn't economically sustain that production model for weekly television.
And this limitation became a creative language. Anime learned how to make less animation do more work.
That influenced practically everything: Character designs became highly expressive, Facial expressions could communicate enormous amounts of emotion, Camera movements could create drama without requiring extensive character animation, Speed lines and visual effects could imply motion, Dramatic still frames could create tension, Reused animation could establish recurring visual motifs, Music and sound effects could compensate for relatively limited movement, Dialogue could carry enormous amounts of narrative information.
In other words, anime didn't necessarily overcome the limitations of television animation, It learned how to use them to their advantage.
The famous "anime eyes" are the best example of this. While it's often treated as if they are some bizarre Japanese invention, they're better understood as part of the larger tradition of visual exaggeration in animation.
Large eyes make expressions easier to read while exaggerated faces communicate emotions quickly. Tezuka's fascination with Disney is particularly relevant here as he was borrowing and adapting an existing animation vocabulary but integrating it with the visual language of manga and anime; using what could work in limited animation or comics just as well as in theatrical animation without the excess movement.
This is where I think the American comparison becomes particularly interesting. For much of the twentieth century, American animation was caught between two worlds: The theatrical animation had been enormously important, but television transformed the economics of animation.
The problem was that American television networks and studios often treated animation primarily as children's programming.
That created a vicious cycle. Animation was considered children's entertainment. Because it was children's entertainment, it was expected to be inexpensive. Because it was inexpensive, production quality and storytelling were frequently constrained. Because much of it was aimed at children, adults were discouraged from taking animation seriously. And because adults didn't take animation seriously, the medium remained culturally pigeonholed as children's entertainment.
Japan developed a different solution.
Anime could still be made for children—but it could also be made for teenagers and adults.
Television therefore became a distribution platform for an enormous range of animated storytelling. And eventually Japan expanded beyond television.
There were theatrical films, direct-to-video productions and OVAs, then DVDs and Blu-rays, and eventually streaming. Anime was therefore able to evolve alongside every major change in home entertainment.
This might ultimately be the most important point.
In America, the word "animation" has historically been associated with a particular production technique and, increasingly, with a particular audience. In Japan, anime became much closer to being a medium. The same basic visual technique could be used to tell completely different kinds of stories. The assumption that "it's animated, therefore it's for children" was never allowed to become quite as absolute. And that difference has enormous consequences.
4) Anime Has Never Been Afraid to Put Girls at the Center
Another major difference between anime and Western animation is something that is easy to overlook precisely because it has become so normal in Japan:
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nime has a long tradition of putting young female characters at the center of stories.
This isn't limited to romance, princess stories, or shows explicitly marketed toward girls. Female protagonists and major female characters have been a normal part of Japanese animation for decades, including in genres whose audiences are predominantly male.
And this goes back surprisingly far.
One of the clearest examples is the magical girl genre.
The tradition goes back to Sally the Witch, which debuted in the 1960s, and was followed by series such as Himitsu no Akko-chan, Lululun, Lalabel, Creamy Mami, Sailor Moon, Cardcaptor Sakura, and Pretty Cure.
The specific formula has changed dramatically over the decades, but the basic idea is remarkably durable:
A young girl is the protagonist, and her femininity isn't something that has to be overcome for her to become the hero.
That's an important distinction.
The girl doesn't necessarily have to become "one of the boys" in order to be heroic. She can be cute, emotional, fashionable, romantic, compassionate, frightened, immature, or otherwise traditionally feminine—and still be the central character driving the story.
That may sound obvious today, but historically it wasn't always treated that way in Western animation.
And There's an interesting irony here.
Anime's willingness to center female characters doesn't necessarily correspond to what Westerners would conventionally call feminism. In fact, many anime heroines bear little resemblance to the modern Western cliché of the "strong independent female protagonist." Anime is perfectly comfortable allowing female characters to be vulnerable. They can cry, They can be frightened, They can make mistakes, They can be childish, They can depend upon other characters (male or female), They can be physically weak, They can be cute without the narrative treating "cute" as something embarrassing that they need to outgrow.
The important thing is that none of these characteristics automatically disqualifies them from being the protagonist. That's a very different philosophy from simply creating a female character who behaves exactly like a traditionally masculine action hero and changing the gender.
Why Are Girls So Common in Anime? There are probably several explanations.
One is simply that Japanese creators discovered very early that female characters can be extraordinarily expressive. Anime is a highly stylized medium. Facial expressions, body language, costumes, mannerisms, voices, and exaggerated reactions are all extremely important. And cute, expressive characters are incredibly useful within that visual language.
By contrast, Western animation historically developed with a very different set of defaults.
American animation has often had a tendency to default toward male protagonists—or toward animals and other non-human characters.
Think about the enormous number of famous American animated protagonists who aren't even human. This isn't inherently bad. Some of the greatest animated characters ever created are animals.
But it does create an interesting consequence:
When Western animation does put a human girl at the center, it can feel like a separate category of animation.
Instead of simply being "an animated adventure featuring a girl," it becomes a "girly cartoon."
That distinction has historically mattered. A boys' or general-audience animated property could be assumed to be universal. A female-centered property was much more likely to be categorized as being specifically for girls; creating a genuinely sexist double standard
Princesses provides perhaps the clearest example.
Disney has created many of the most famous female protagonists in animation history. But the enormous commercial success of the Disney “Princess” brand has also created an association between female-centered animation and princess stories. Even when a movie isn't technically about a princess by royal title, audiences can still interpret a female-led animated film through that framework.
Bear in mind this is coming from someone who had a huge crush on Ariel and other Disney “Princesses” growing up, but was discouraged from “princess” media because people said it was too “girly”.
Anime has certainly developed its own gendered marketing categories—Japan is hardly free of them—but it has historically been more willing to allow female characters to cross those boundaries.
A girl can be the protagonist of an anime geared towards children (Kodomo), teen boys (Shonen), Teen Girls (Shoujo), adult women (Josei), or even Adult Men (Seinen)
She can be a magical girl, a science-fiction hero, a romantic protagonist, or she can simply be an ordinary girl doing ordinary things.
That last category brings us to one of the most interesting developments in modern anime; The rise of iyashikei and slice-of-life anime (probably the most extreme example of this phenomenon)
"Iyashikei" roughly refers to entertainment intended to be soothing, calming, or emotionally healing.
In Iyashikei; girls go about their daily lives, and that's basically the point. They go camping, They attend school, They drink tea, They walk around town, They participate in clubs, They travel, They talk to each other, They enjoy nature…. You get the point. These shows have an almost comically simple premise: Nothing particularly important happens… And that's precisely why people watch them.
What's fascinating is that these productions are primarily marketed toward male audiences, especially hard working salarymen, even though their principal characters are young girls or adolescents.
On the surface, that sounds bizarre from a traditional Western perspective. Why would an adult male audience want to watch a show about a group of schoolgirls going camping?
But the answer is that the characters aren't necessarily there to provide a conventional action narrative, They're there to provide atmosphere. The appeal can be companionship, humor, cuteness, scenery, music, nostalgia, relaxation, or simply the pleasure of watching characters inhabit a pleasant fictional world.
It's almost the opposite of the Hollywood blockbuster philosophy.Nothing has to explode, Nobody has to save the world,The protagonist doesn't need to overcome an oppressive empire ... Sometimes the entire point is simply: "Come spend twenty minutes in this nice little world."
None of this means that Japanese animation is inherently more progressive toward women than Western animation, Nor does having female protagonists automatically make a work feminist. The more important difference is how ordinary female centrality became within the medium. Japan developed an animation culture where a female protagonist didn't necessarily require a special justification.
She didn't have to be a princess, nor did she have to prove that she was "stronger than the boys." She could simply be the protagonist. And once an industry gets used to that idea, the creative possibilities become enormous.
That's one reason anime can move so effortlessly from Sailor Moon to to slice-of-life. The underlying assumption is remarkably simple: girls can carry a story. And Japanese animation has been proving that assumption for more than half a century.
5) Anime Has Historically Faced Fewer Centralized Restrictions
Another major reason anime has been able to develop such an enormous range of genres and styles is that, compared with Western animation, it has historically operated under fewer centralized corporate and Government restrictions.
This doesn't mean that Japanese animation has been completely free of censorship or commercial pressure. Far from it. Anime has television regulations, age ratings, advertisers, publishers, production committees, broadcasting standards, and plenty of other constraints. The difference is that these restrictions have generally been more lax and fragmented across an enormous industry, rather than concentrated around a small number of institutions that collectively determine what mainstream animation is supposed to look like.
And that difference has enormous creative consequences.
American animation, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century, went through several periods in which its creative possibilities became increasingly constrained.
In the 1970s, American television animation was heavily shaped by regulations, network expectations, and production economics.
The industry had discovered that cartoons could be produced cheaply enough to fill large amounts of television programming, particularly children's programming.But instead of creating an environment where animation could mature into a general-purpose storytelling medium, this often produced the opposite effect.
Animation became increasingly associated with children's television. There were strict limitations on what could be shown, and this increasingly entrenched assumption about what a cartoon was supposed to be; basically childish entertainment for kids. The result was an industry that could produce enormous quantities of animation while simultaneously narrowing the range of stories it was expected to tell.
On the flipside, there was the 1990s.
The success of Disney's animated features in the Disney Renaissance was an extraordinary artistic and commercial achievement. But it also demonstrated something important to Hollywood: animation could make an enormous amount of money. And when Hollywood discovers that something can make an enormous amount of money, corporate oversight tends to follow.Animation increasingly became an extremely expensive proposition. Studios needed recognizable brands, marketable characters, merchandising opportunities, international appeal, demographic projections... They needed to know whether a film could become a blockbuster before committing enormous amounts of money to it.
This doesn't mean that Disney or other studios stopped making great animation, Quite the opposite. But the economics of the business made experimentation increasingly difficult. When a movie costs hundreds of millions of dollars to produce and market, the question inevitably becomes: "Will people pay to see this?"
The 1980s was a brief ideal middle ground. The old television restrictions were beginning to loosen, while the theatrical animation renaissance had not yet completely transformed the industry's corporate structure.
This created a period in which creators could experiment with material that would have been much harder to make in the previous decade; darker fantasy, science fiction, action adventure, cartoons made for girls, even the occasional ambitious theatrical projects (i.e. Don Bluth). But the industry, thanks to government and network overreach prior, was still carrying decades of accumulated expectations; The deeply embedded idea that animation was fundamentally children's entertainment remained. So even when creators were given more freedom, they were still often working against an enormous collection of unwritten rules about what animation was supposed to be. The notorious Toy tie ins underscored this dynamic
By Contrast; Japan was developing differently during these same decades; with The 1970s and 1980s being enormously important, and prosperous, for anime.
Instead of animation being locked into one dominant identity, Japanese creators were experimenting with different audiences, formats, and genres. Television anime could be made for children just as much as It could be made for teenagers or adults. One of my favorite examples is Fujiko F. Fujio. The same creator[s] associated with the popular kids manga and anime Doraemon could also create The Psychological Horror The Laughing Salesman for adults and the magical girl series Esper Mami for teens.
And that kind of creative mobility is possible because creators and audiences don't necessarily demand that every work conform to one carefully maintained corporate identity. A creator can be associated with something wholesome and child-friendly while also exploring darker, stranger, or more experimental material elsewhere.
By the 1980s, home video created another avenue for experimentation.
The rise of the OVA (Original Video Animation) market was particularly important because creators could make productions outside the traditional constraints of weekly television.This helped anime develop genres and styles that would have been difficult to justify within the American Saturday-morning-cartoon model.
The result was an important feedback loop:
the more genres anime explored, the more audiences it could attract; the more audiences it attracted, the more justification there was for creating specialized productions.
This is where the comparison with Disney becomes particularly interesting.
It would be unfair to say that Disney never experimented. Disney has repeatedly demonstrated that it can make stories outside the stereotypical "princess fantasy" formula. Movies like 101 Dalmatians, The Rescuers, Oliver & Company, Lilo & Stitch, Atlantis The Lost Empire, Treasure Planet, and others come to mind. But the company's enormous size creates a fundamental problem. Every Disney production is still a Disney production, and the company's brand is extraordinarily valuable to itself. That means experimentation is often sideline in favor of what is pragmatic; which usually amounts to fantasy musicals. The problem isn't necessarily that Disney can't make these stories, it's that the Disney brand has become so powerful that audiences often interpret its animation through a relatively narrow set of expectations.
By contrast, Anime never developed an equivalent single corporate identity. A small Japanese manga artist or anime director can make a strange side project without necessarily changing the public's perception of an entire multinational entertainment corporation.
This is ultimately why I think anime was able to expand into virtually every genre of storytelling.It wasn't because Japanese animators possessed some mysterious creative advantage, It was because the Japanese animation industry developed a structure in which experimentation was comparatively easier to sustain. And that freedom of experimentation may be one of the biggest reasons that, decades later, anime can still surprise audiences in ways that mainstream Western animation still struggles to do.
6) Anime Is Treated as a Legitimate Part of Japanese Culture
Perhaps one of the biggest differences between Japan and the United States, or the "Western world" in general, is that Japan has generally been much more willing to treat popular culture as a legitimate component of national culture.
Japan is an unusually interesting country in this regard.
It is simultaneously one of the world's most technologically advanced societies and one that places enormous value on preserving historical traditions. Ancient temples and Centuries-old festivals coexist alongside skyscrapers, bullet trains, convenience stores, robotics, and some of the world's most technologically sophisticated cities. Japan doesn't necessarily see modernity and tradition as opposites. And I think that philosophy extends to popular culture.
By contrast , "national culture" tends to mean things inherited from the past in many countries: architecture, classical music, literature, traditional clothing, cuisine, historical monuments, and so forth; Though they are seldom relevant to their increasingly globalized postnational culture in the present day. This is especially true in western Europe and the British Commonwealth, which has ironically been in cultural decline since World War II.
Likewise, America obviously has no shortage of popular culture either that has become globally influential. Hollywood, rock music, jazz, theatrical animation, television, comics, video games, and countless other American inventions have shaped the world. But there has historically been a peculiar cultural hierarchy surrounding them. Certain forms of entertainment are treated as "serious culture" while others are treated as disposable commercial entertainment. This can also be quite hypocritical and self defeating, especially when unamerican socialists like John Steinbeck rank higher on the list than Patriotic Americans like Walt Disney.
American Animation has suffered particularly badly from this attitude. For much of American history, animation was viewed primarily as something for children, regardless of what individual productions were actually trying to accomplish.
Japan certainly has an older or higher "national culture" they inherited from the past . But Japan has also been remarkably willing to say: "The things we create today are part of Japanese culture too." Anime is an obvious example, Manga is another, So are video games, J-pop, fashion, character merchandising, design, and other forms of contemporary Japanese popular culture. These aren't necessarily treated as embarrassing deviations from "real" Japanese culture. They can become part of the country's cultural identity. That distinction is enormously important.
This is where the Japanese government's Cool Japan strategy also becomes relevant. The idea behind Cool Japan is essentially that Japan's international influence doesn't come exclusively from automobiles, electronics, industrial technology, or traditional culture. It also comes from Japanese pop culture.
Anime is one of the most obvious components of that strategy. Manga, games, fashion, music, food, design, and other forms of contemporary Japanese culture all also contribute to the image of Japan abroad. And while the effectiveness of individual Cool Japan initiatives can certainly be debated, the underlying realization is important: cultural influence is itself a form of national influence. Japan doesn't have to choose between being the country of samurai, temples, and tea ceremonies and being the country of anime, games, neon-lit cities, and high-speed trains; It can be both.
That is one reason the image of Japan remains so unusually powerful internationally. By contrast, related schemes like Cool Britannia died with the nineties while the global appeal of Americana had been in decline since the end of the Cold war
There's an important caveat here.
Anime wasn't suddenly declared important by the Japanese government and then became popular. The cultural infrastructure existed long before Cool Japan. Anime had already become a major part of Japanese entertainment through television, manga, movies, home video, merchandise, and fandom. What Cool Japan did was essentially recognize that this cultural influence could also be used as a component of Japan's international image. In other words; the government didn't create the phenomenon, It recognized the phenomenon.
There's another paradox here.
Japan is frequently portrayed internationally as a futuristic society. And compared with most countries, it certainly has an extraordinary reputation for technological sophistication and modern urban life. Yet Japan is also deeply attached to tradition. And anime itself reflects this coexistence.
Perhaps the most obvious example is the continued dominance of 2D animation. The rest of the world's mainstream animation industries have increasingly embraced dime a dozen computer-generated imagery. Hollywood feature animation especially became overwhelmingly associated with CGI. But while Japan adopted digital tools too, of course (Modern anime is hardly being produced exactly the way television animation was produced in 1963), the fundamental visual language of hand-drawn, 2D-inspired animation remains.
And ironically, I think this has worked enormously in anime's favor.
The continued existence of a recognizable 2D aesthetic means that anime hasn't simply become another branch of the globalized and ultra-standardized CGI industry. Instead, It has retained a distinct visual identity. Even when computers are used to assist production, the look can remain rooted in illustration, manga, hand-drawn character design, and traditional animation principles. That distinction matters in an increasingly homogenized global entertainment market.
There's an irony here. What might have been interpreted as technological backwardness eventually becomes one of anime's greatest competitive advantages.
While much of the Western mainstream animation industry converged around increasingly interchangeable CGI productions, anime maintained a visual identity that could immediately distinguish it from Hollywood animation; even if the designs work off of a standard set of unwritten rules. Spy × Family and Laid Back Camp stands out far more in the 2020s than your run of the mill Minions or frozen movie.
In a strange way, anime's refusal to completely "move on" from its past became one of the reasons it remained relevant in the future.
7) Anime Became an Ecosystem, Not Just an Industry
If there is one thing that ties all of these points together, it's this:
Anime works because Japan didn't simply develop an animation industry. It developed an entire ecosystem around animation.
None of the previous six points, by themselves, completely explain anime's success.
Postwar Japan created the economic and cultural circumstances in which manga and popular entertainment could flourish.
Manga provided an enormous storytelling and character-development pipeline.
The absence of a single Disney-like entity allowed the industry to remain relatively fragmented and consequently capable of supporting an enormous variety of creators, studios, genres, and audiences.
Television forced Japanese animation to develop an inexpensive but highly expressive visual language that could sustain weekly storytelling.
The long tradition of female protagonists and niche-oriented storytelling demonstrated that anime didn't have to be restricted to the traditional Western idea of what a "cartoon" was supposed to be.
And Japan's willingness to recognize anime and manga as legitimate components of contemporary culture gave the medium an unusually secure place within Japanese society.
But the real magic happens when all of these things interact.
Ironically, anime's globalization may have happened precisely because it wasn't originally designed to be global. Japanese creators weren't necessarily trying to create entertainment that would appeal to every culture on Earth, They were creating entertainment for Japanese audiences. That allowed anime to develop its own visual language, storytelling conventions, character archetypes, humor, genres, and cultural references. And when the rest of the world eventually became interested, it discovered something that felt different.
That difference became part of the appeal.
People weren't watching anime because it was a Japanese version of American animation. They were watching it because it was something else.
Final Takeaway: Anime Is What Happens When Animation Is Allowed to Be a Medium
And perhaps that's my biggest takeaway.
The question shouldn't really be: "Why is anime better than Western animation?". There is too much great Western animation for that to be a useful argument.
The better question is: "Why did Japan allow animation to become a medium in the fullest sense of the word?"
If Western animation wants to become more successful, the answer isn't necessarily to copy anime's character designs, pacing, visual effects, or storytelling conventions.
That would miss the point. Anime didn't become successful because somebody invented the perfect art style. It became successful because an entire society developed an ecosystem that allowed animation to flourish.
I would not dare pretend either that Western animation is beneath Anime. In fact, when done right, a good piece of American Traditional animation (especially feature animation) can easily put any run of the mill anime to shame. Similarly, American Family animation has always been more than capable of crossing age boundaries to appeal to more than just kids or adults alone. And when a good piece of American Traditional animation depicts a non fantasy setting the right way, especially when Sci-fi or "Present day", it can showcase the best qualities of animation as a format built for such imaginative scenarios.
The key takeaway here is "imaginative scenarios". Traditional Animation can depict more than just fairy tales but also explore some of the deepest ideas of our human imagination in a way live action or CGI could never do. Once animation is understood that way, the possibilities become practically limitless.
And that's ultimately why I think anime has endured. Japan didn't simply figure out how to make better cartoons. Japan figured out how to make animation into a culture.
